Brittle drifted aimlessly amongst a sea of inky black. Phantasmic clouds of green, blue, and pink stardust danced across the endless expanse, reminiscent of the northern sky on a clear winter night. A glimmering body of dazzling blue expanded before him, enveloping him within its cosmic folds. Brittle flinched, expecting the floating particles of light to singe like cinders against his tortured bark. Instead, he felt nothing at all.
He glanced down and realized why. His brittle trunk, twiggy limbs, and cork bark toes were gone. In their stead floated a spectral cloud of dull, transparent gray. A terrible sadness weighed heavy within his incorporeal form. He had already lost so much, Mama, his friends, his swamp, his life – being taken from his body felt like the final blow in a string of heart-wrenching losses.
The waves of dancing cosmic dust dissipated, revealing a circle of blinding white light hovering in the distance. Caught in a slow-moving tide, Brittle found himself drifting closer and closer, watching helplessly as the blaze of light reared up to swallow him. Brittle tried to turn but, without legs, he didn’t know how to change direction. Stubbornly, he summoned the last of his energy and willed his phantom body to break free of the invisible tide.
To his surprise, his body obeyed.
Brittle darted back through the ethereal clouds of galactic dust. He picked up speed as he zipped along. While he didn’t know where he was going, he certainly knew where he didn’t want to be. The light of the blazing, white circle grew fainter behind him as he surged forward, feeling his incorporeal body blur as he fled his fate.
He traveled in a manner that defied time – feeling simultaneously like forever and that no time had passed at all. Eventually, the phantasmic clouds thinned and Brittle saw soft lights glowing below. He jetted past them, unwilling to slow his breakneck hurtle. Something called to him. Its faint, melodic whisper was a siren song on the breeze, guiding him closer. Brittle streaked across the black expanse as the song crescendoed, drawing him like a spellbound moth to flame.
At last, he found the source of the call. A pale green aura pulsed against the inky black below him. Brittle willed himself towards it. The siren song filled his phantom ears until its melody resonated within every fiber of his incorporeal being. Black, cottony clouds blurred past as Brittle’s soul blazed towards the eerie glow. He was nearly upon it when his form jerked to a sudden halt.
Gathering his energy, he attempted to move closer but struck the same invisible wall as before. No matter how he twisted and turned, zipping up, over, and around, he was prevented from drawing any nearer.
Crestfallen, his dull body grew still. As he hovered afloat amongst the gloom, unwilling to move on, the shroud of dark clouds drew back, revealing the source of the call. Brittle saw the Goddess of Ill Fortune knelt on the ground, clutching the fractured body of a wee bog log beast. His body, to be specific. Although it didn’t look much like he remembered it. His lovely bark hide was singed black with deep fissures marring what had once been solid. The hollows that made up his eyes were vacant, missing their hauntingly enchanting glow.
The others were gathered around as well. Even Edvin, whose battered body looked nearly as poorly as Brittle’s. Gilly rested her head on the trunk of the wee bog log beast. Her scaled sides heaved in and out with each laborious breath. Sir Thomassin had his head buried in his hands, slumped over beside them.
“Gilly!” Brittle screamed. “Mara! Sir Thomassin!”
His shapeless form quivered from the vibrations of his tiny voice. The slumped figures below remained as they were, unaware of his hovering presence. “Edvin!” Brittle surged forward but bounced back against the same invisible boundary as before. Weightless, his incorporeal form felt inexplicably heavy. Shudders of sadness rippled through him as Brittle felt his soul sink in dread.
“They can’t hear me,” he whispered to himself.
“As it is designed to be.”
Brittle was startled to find a young girl hovering beside him. Unlike him, her ghost-like body had retained its former shape. Most startling of all were her pupilless eyes, which were the color of white opal. Her unblinking gaze radiated shimmers of sparkling light as she watched the pitiful scene unfold below. An unreadable expression settled over the girl’s cherub face. “This is the spirit realm. Sometimes a very determined spirit can find a thin spot, such as this one, but you’ll never breach the barrier.”
For some inexplicable reason, Brittle knew who the little girl was. “You’re Amaia, Goddess of the End.”
“I am.” She watched him from the corner of her eye. “Does that surprise you?”
“Well, it’s just…” Brittle voice trailed, not sure if he wanted to start off on the wrong foot by insulting the goddess in charge of collecting passed souls. “Why do you look like that?”
“Most find my true form frightening. I find it helps ease the transition if I project myself as something more inviting.”
And here Brittle thought strange, floating little girls with translucent paper skin and glowing eyes were the opposite of inviting. He remembered his manners and decided against bringing it to the goddess’s attention.
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“You were supposed to go to the light,” Amaia said. “Why did you flee?”
“I didn’t get to say goodbye. It’s rude not to, you know.”
A smile tugged at the corner of Amaia’s lips. “Your mother said the same thing.”
Brittle may not have had eyes anymore, but he felt phantom tears well up all the same. “You met Mama?”
Amaia turned and gestured to the circle glowing in the distance behind them. It was little more than a pinpoint of light now. “She’s there, waiting for you.”
Brittle bristled at the thought, still untrusting of the ominous light. He blamed it on his well-earned disdain for portals. “And where is that?”
“The beyond.” Amaia was being awfully patient for someone whose job it was to shepherd souls into the afterlife. Brittle assumed she had better things to do than explain it all to a stubborn bog log beast. “The spirit realm acts as the in-between. A plane of existence for those souls unwilling to move on.”
“I don’t want to move on.”
“I had a feeling you would say that.”
“You see them, don’t you?” Brittle gestured to the dim glow below with a ripple of his incorporeal body. “They’ll be lost without me. I mean, not Gilly, obviously. That lizard’s got her life together, but I’m not so sure about the rest. Look at Sir Thomassin, for peat’s sake! He already lost his only purpose in life. He can’t lose his best friend too.”
Amaia’s eyebrows perked high on her ghost-like head. “You’re his best friend?”
“Well I assume so! Why else would he be floating about my front swamp all the time? Sometimes I come up with quests just to give the poor feller something to do.” Brittle’s excuses were bordering on desperate now, but he couldn’t go out having not tried. “And Edvin! Are you really going to deprive him of the wee log child he’s only just met? We still have so much father-log-son bonding to catch up on.”
The Goddess of the End looked unconvinced.
Oh to have shoulders with which to shrug right now. “Might help heal the wounds left from his own father.”
Amaia’s brows lifted even higher. “His father?”
“Yeah, Gabor. A big, nasty meanie. Or was anyway, before Mara did something to him. Honestly, it’s still all a bit fuzzy.”
The goddess’s ghostly expression slipped unreadable once more as she turned her head to gaze at him straight on. Her opal eyes looked him up and down, as if seeing something he could not. “Interesting.”
“And Mara.” Brittle’s sinking soul slumped a little further. It was good there wasn’t tangible ground beneath them, he supposed. Otherwise his incorporeal body would have pooled into a puddle of sadness at Amaia’s feet. “I’m worried about her the most. I think Gabor might have broke something in her doing what he did.”
“I fear you might be right, young bog log beast,” Amaia said. “She is the first and only deity to have ever wiped a god from existence. As you can imagine, it has ruffled some feathers. While no one can ever truly know what the fates hold, I suspect life for your goddess is not destined to get any easier.”
“Then you understand why I have to go back, right?”
“Mortals cannot return. The rules are very clear on the matter.”
“Is there any wiggle room for abominations? Not just an abomination to the natural order, but to the gods themselves? My kind didn’t come about the normal way, you know. We were birthed into existence by a goddess.”
“By mistake.”
“So? Gilly says plenty of good of people are born that way,” Brittle replied matter-of-factly. It was bold, he knew, but he didn’t have anything left to lose at this point. “That would, by definition, make bog log beasts demigods, no?”
“By loose definition, perhaps,” Amaia said with a frown. “I will remind you, however, that demigods can and will die just as easily as mortals can.”
“But are the rules as stringent for them as they are mortals, I wonder?”
The goddess’s eerie eyes narrowed at him. “You are every ounce as stubborn as your mother claimed.”
Brittle felt suddenly compelled to prove it. “I’m not going and you can’t make me!” He sorely wished he had arms to fold defiantly over his incorporeal chest. Arguing just wasn’t the same without the overdramatic gestures. “I’ll remain in the spirit world if I have to. I’ll spend every day searching for a way back. And when that doesn’t work, I’ll accompany you whenever you enter this plane.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a promise. And boy can I talk. I can just yammer away for hours on end about nothin’ at all. You like soil, Goddess? I sure hope so, ‘cause you will be an expert by next week, I guarantee it.”
Amaia considered the validity of his threat for several painstaking seconds before posing a new question. “And what will your mother think?”
“I suppose Mama would say I was mighty foolish. And that my judgment is as poor as ever. But I think she’d understand that this is one of those things a wee bog log beast has got to do. I may not have hollow bones anymore, but I can feel it burning a hole inside of me all the same.”
Amaia, Goddess of the End, said nothing. Her lips pursed as her gaze moved lower. It seemed a bit rude, to be honest. Skeptical, Brittle followed her line of sight, taken back to find his ethereal body aglow with emerald light. The radiance started as a flickering pinpoint of light at his center. It spread quickly, rippling as it formed familiar extremities.
Amaia tilted her head to the side as her smile fully committed, spreading all the way across her ghostly face. “You speak with great power for one so small.”
Brittle held one of his phantom hands in front of his face, bewildered. “You‘re giving me my body back?”
“Not me, the fates. It appears they are in agreement.”
Brittle opened his mouth, but the words were swallowed by distance as the sky dropped out from underneath him. He plummeted, streaking downwards. He fell so rapidly the edges of his phantasmal body lit with green sparks, glowing like a falling star against the inky black.
The Goddess of the End’s disembodied voice echoed within his hollow head. “You, Brittle Rotten Wood, demigod of unknown power, have proven yourself worthy through and through. You are hereby granted permission to return to the mortal realm under one condition. You will serve to remind the Goddess of Ill Fortune of the good that still exists within the world. If you wish to stay, then you will keep her from the heinous role her creator designed her to fulfill.”
His vision blurred as he fell. Once more, for what Brittle hoped would be the last time that day, possibly ever, his world went dark.